"I know that I have to hold Daniel’s story close, not let anyone else find a different narrative, impose a different reading, because I’m the one who needs to make sense of it. I’m still trying every day, every single day to do that, and perhaps in time, even though I can’t easily imagine it, it might become a story that can be shared because I don’t need a shrink to tell me that holding it so close will be corrosive and stop me being fully what I need to be for my children. These are things I know in my head but have not yet felt in my heart, or being, or wherever it is you need to experience them. I’m travelling in a strange land."

This book is the first by David Park I have read – the book’s set up is simple and outlined by the novel’s first person narrator Tom, married to Lorna who lives with him and their young daughter Lily in Northern Ireland.

"Our son Luke is stranded in Sunderland with three days to go to Christmas and Newcastle airport closed. He’s at university and living in a rambling, decrepit Edwardian house whose five other students have all decamped for the holidays. So he’s on his own and he’s not well. What’s afflicting him has not been entirely clear from his phone calls but he’s got a temperature and symptoms that suggest flu."

Great Britain has been struck by an unprecedently fierce Winter Storm and Tom sets off on a car and car ferry journey to pick up Luke – all the time reflecting on his family (particularly his difficult courtship of Lorna and the deeply affecting strength of the relationship between them) fatherhood and particularly his other son Daniel.

Memories of Daniel’s character, his risk taking character as a young child through to troubled teenage years, his difficult life choices and his highly strained relationship with his parents (which in turn affect their relationship with his younger brother Luke) occupy his sleeping and waking imagination.

"The fruit of my loins, that’s what they call your child, so this is to be my life’s harvest. This is what has been brought to fruition and as always there’s the same question, repeated over and over, as to how you tended that growth, how well you protected it from disease. I tell myself that the world is filled with infected spores, that they blow where they will, carried on currents invisible to the eye and so impossible to repulse. But none of it convinces and I am shackled to that inescapable burden of guilt and, despite knowing I must somehow find a way to glimpse even the beginning of absolution if I am to survive,"

Tom is a photographer – an aspirational Ansel Adams but in fact spending most of his time photographing weddings or school fetes (which is how he met Lorna) and the book contains occasional fascinating discourses on some of the trends in photography (for example the Demi Moore inspired requests for pregnancy shots) and the increasing threat of selfies. Tom sees photography as an art and its clear also as informing his own philosophy on life and his thoughts on his family relationships.

"So what do I want to take photographs of? It’s hard to put it into words but I suppose the moment that lies just below the surface of things, or a glimpse of the familiar from a different angle."

"I do this a lot –try to create pictures and let them pave the way to some future happiness but they are short-lived, almost fading away as soon as they’ve been printed and exposed to the light because in their place are more insistent and caustic ones that seem to exist outside any exercise of my will."

The journey itself, and the snow increasingly serve as metaphors for Tom’s life journey and his relationships.

"And bringing up a child isn’t like driving this car where I have the voice to guide me and, despite the snow, the tracks of other cars to follow, signals to tell me when to stop and when to go, warnings about possible hazards. Instead what you have is a kind of blizzard of conflicting and confusing ideas where, despite thinking you know the best direction to take, it soon becomes obvious that you’ve lost your way and the familiar landmarks that you put so much store by have disappeared in a white-out"

Tom’s thoughts are particularly occupied by a conversation with Daniel and a photo of him that he has kept secret from Lorna and sees his journey as one of potential redemption allowing him to admit his guilt to Lorna, and move their family forwards with a fresh start – an idea which again gets tied up with his physical journey .

"Mile after mile. Making the journey that feels as important as anything I’ve ever done since Daniel and which I have started to believe might be able to somehow change things if I pull it off, even set things back in an older balance before the plates tilted and everything fell askew."

"Somehow Lorna and I have stayed together. And I’m grateful for that, frightened of doing anything that would put us in danger, so I have to think things out on this journey but I don’t know if the monochrome world I’m travelling through makes it easier or harder. Things are more complicated than choosing between what I think is right and what I don’t know is wrong. The snow conceals everything but I’m not sure if I can go on covering what for the moment is hidden and I’m not always a strong person inside so I’m frightened that like some sudden thaw I’ll let it out when she’s not expecting it and when it’s not the right time to release it."

Overall this was a strong read – Park is clearly a very talented writer and there is a gentle strength to this book, with its themes of fatherhood, love, forgiveness (including forgiveness of yourself), redemption and the attractions to a non-practitioner of a religious faith which offers those, which I really enjoyed.

"I’m coming now, Luke, and if God does really keep score, let him record that I’m going to continue my journey until I finally get to hear the voice that has brought me safely here, say, ‘You have reached your destination.’ The world is growing colder. I start to lift the wigwam but then something tells me I have to leave it, that this is where it belongs, and I hope that Lilly will somehow come to understand, understand that her father left it here for the homeless, for every soul in need of shelter and, as the sun finally sets over this snow-covered world, for every fellow traveller, lost like him in a strange land."

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley

10 stars

Having read reviews comparing David Parks to Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and J. M. Coetzee I had very high hopes for #TravellingInAStrangeLand. But within a dozen or so pages I was already feeling the comparison should be working the other way around. This isn’t to take anything away from these other esteemed writers - all of whom I love - but simply that I can’t think of anything they’ve written which has touched me in quite the same way.

In many ways, the book it reminded most of was the sorrowful pleasure of reading Flaubert’s Parrot. That sense of being completely inside someone else’s head - of seeing the world through their eyes and the preoccupations of their inner landscapes and yet. In this case, the things these eyes see are endlessly interesting because they are a photographer.

The story is simple. It’s a few days before Christmas and the airports and trains have been brought to a standstill. Despite the best efforts of the Met Office and police to urge people not to attempt travel, a father sets off from Belfast to collect his son from his university digs in Sunderland. Although, technically, he is travelling on his own, he is never alone.

The prose is exceptional, the cadences and accumulation of perfect details are an endless joy to read; everything is tightly controlled, yet there’s no escaping the feeling the fuse to an emotional time-bomb has been lit somewhere just out of your line of sight. But more than any of this, it’s the candour with which this son/husband/father is laid bare which flayed my heart.

It’s a testament to fatherly love, and it was impossible to read without thinking of my own father, and how impressed he had been with Truth Commissioner. I miss him all the time anyway, but all the more so today while holding a book I know he would have revelled in. So, it’s five stars from me and five from my dad, who sadly didn’t live long enough to be floored by Travelling in a Strange Land.

I’m not really sure what else I can say to do this justice. Surely this will be on every major prize list going in 2018? It’s only April, but I’m now itching to cast my Book of the Year vote.

I am exceedingly grateful to the publisher and Netgalley for letting me see an advance readers’ copy of Travelling in a Strange Land.

Travelling in a Strange Land is another masterpiece from David Park.

Tom is a photographer. Often commissioned for weddings and portraits, he has a good eye for composition. He is a man of taste and discernment, appreciating his surroundings and those around him. He knows he is being superseded by the ubiquity of the selfie, shared on social media in an instant, forgotten in a moment – but he still believes he offers a quality product. He is a comfortable man with a comfortable life in North Down (my guess is Holywood).

Shortly before Christmas, his son Luke is stranded in his university digs in Sunderland, snow has closed the airport and Luke has a terrible cold. Tom is sent out on a rescue mission to bring Luke home for Christmas. The plan is to get the first ferry to Stranraer, drive to Sunderland and back in time for the last sailing home. God and snow willing…

The novel is Tom, alone in a car, lost in his own thoughts as he travels across a strange land. Self-satisfaction starts to fray a little at the edges, and ultimately Tom’s thoughts are overtaken by his older son, Daniel, who is no longer part of the happy family. Daniel was a difficult child who became a difficult adult. Tom skates a fine line between guilt at his failure to love Daniel completely and resentment of Daniel for not being easy to love. All this crowding out the feelings he ought to have been having for Luke. There are occasional interruptions to phone home, the occasional interjection of the satnav, and a stop or two along the way. But mostly the strange land through which Tom is travelling is his own mind rather than the Scottish borders.

The journey takes us back in time to a Northern Ireland long gone: paramilitaries and territoriality. There is a journey too through different social classes; Tom steps away from leafy North Down to explore the Belfast drinking dens and squalid bedsits of the Holy Lands. And then there is the journey through generations; from youth to fatherhood, back into the world of the young as he tries to find reconciliation with Daniel. As we get to know Tom’s story, we start to see him as more than the slightly pompous photographer. He is a man struggling to understand familial love and to accept human failings. It is not that Tom is perfect; he knows he isn’t and knows that neither he nor anyone else ever can be. It is that Tom cannot accept his own imperfection.

There are some beautiful set pieces, sometimes inspiring, sometimes harrowing. The imagery is undemonstrative but precise. David Park needs few words to convey really complex ideas – not least the bonding near the end with the Angel of the North. Park trusts his readers to fill in the blanks, to make associations, and gives his readers the time and space to let their own imaginations wander. Park is a generous writer who lets the inherent goodness of the human spirit shine through in his characters, even when they go to dark places.

David Park is one of the finest writers; pretty much every one of his works could match anything from Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro. Yes, he really is that good. I hope that one day he will get the recognition he so richly deserves.

This is only the second novel I have read by David Park (The Light of Amsterdam was the first) but I seem to be reading a lot of sad stories by Irish authors these days. However, the writing is usually so sublime that I can't resist them - and this moving and lyrical novel is no exception.
Tom, the narrator, is travelling from Belfast to Sunderland in heavy snow to collect his son from university for the Christmas holidays. With only a satnav for company, the journey becomes a metaphorical one in his mind's eye, as he relives past events and a family tragedy for which he blames himself.
Park is a brilliant scene-setter, placing us in the passenger seat and filling our senses with his atmospheric depiction of the treacherous frozen landscapes leading to Tom’s loss of bearings: -

"And bringing up a child isn’t like driving this car where I have the voice to guide me and the tracks of other cars to follow, signals to tell me when to stop and when to go, warnings about possible hazards. Instead what you have is a kind of blizzard of conflicting and confusing ideas where, despite thinking you know the best direction to take, it soon becomes obvious that you’ve lost your way and the familiar landmarks that you put so much store by have disappeared in a white-out."

However, the bleaker memories are softened with touching reminiscences that will surely resonate with all parents (especially fathers of teenage sons) when contemplating failures of communication between them:

"(Lorna) was snooping on his Facebook page ... And that’s a parental crime that comes close to every child’s idea of a capital offence. It’s a mystery to me that they want to pass through life without oversight or monitoring and yet leave a trail across virtual space like scattered debris that someone with the time and inclination can piece it back together the way they reassemble those planes after a disaster."

I must add that with the current blast of Siberian weather over the British Isles, this novel's wintry atmosphere feels even more vivid!

A father sets out on a car journey from the peninsula to Sunderland to pick up his son Luke from university. It is a few days before Christmas, and the airports are shutdown due to recent heavy snow. As Tom drives, making slow progress due to poor road conditions, his thoughts become preoccupied with Daniel, as he catches glimpses of him along the way and hears his voice in the music on the CD player.
Tom believes he is a flawed man. He envies and appreciates his wife’s candid approach to problems, and her bravery in dealing with them. The secret he keeps from her needs to be revealed. At his lowest ebb, he longs for the pure white grave but as he surfaces from his despair, he accepts the tomb as a better resting place for his weaknesses and regrets, than for his body.
Travelling in a Strange Land is a quietly atmospheric piece of descriptive writing. It captures the eerie loss of bearings brought about by heavy snowfall and compares it to the sense of being cast adrift experienced in the wake of a family tragedy. This is David Park at his very best.
Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing PLC for granting the wish.

Beautiful and lyrical Sometimes you read a book and the affect it has on you is one of sheer astonishment...astonishment that the written word can be so powerful, so all consuming. David Park is one of the few authors who has the ability to retain my 100 percent attention and to transport me to a time and location that is profoundly sad but yet so lyrical. Tom is on a journey from Belfast to Sunderland to collect his unwell son Luke, and return him home to the family nest for Christmas. The weather is bad, airports are closed, and the journey involves Tom treacherously navigating a frozen landscape. In this desolate setting there is much time to reflect on family life, decisions taken, regrets examined and a haunted memory..."Something brushes a branch further up the slope and snow falls almost in slow motion. I know its Daniel even though I can't see him"....... It soon becomes clear that tragedy has befallen a family member and in the passing of those lonely snowbound hours the full extent and heart break of Daniel's story is laid bare.

What follows is a brilliant wretched story, that demands the reader's attention and sympathy, a sadness and situation that a family must accept and are powerless to change the inevitable ending. Let the words of David Park overwhelm you with their sparse and translucent prose...."The city looks like one of its sleeping homeless, huddled against the cold and layered in borrowed clothes"....."so I have to think things out on this journey but I don't know if the monochrome world I'm travelling through makes it easier or harder"....."life now ebbs and flows only as an inescapable welter of thought and image."....."Strange to be nursed by your child but I guess that reversal of roles is one that probably awaits us all down the road."....

A truly wonderful novel by an exceptional author, many thanks to the good people at netgalley and publisher Bloomsbury for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.

When Tom, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, learns that his son, in Sunderland, England is ill, snowed in and unable to get home for Christmas because the airports are closed, he decides to get in his car, take the ferry and drive across the country through the snow and ice to get him. As the book begins, he is loading his car with provisions and equipment he may need to cope with travelling when the advice on the radio is not to travel.

This book is the story of that journey. Except it isn’t, because it is actually the story of Tom’s mental journey during the time he spends alone in his car. It is a book about being a father in a family that is struggling to survive. It takes very few pages of the novel for us to realise that all is not right in Tom’s family. There are tensions between him and his wife, Lorna. There is something that has gone very wrong in the past and casts its shadow over the family. As Tom drives across Scotland and England to get to Luke, we listen to his internal monologue and gradually come to understand what compels him to travel to Luke when all the travel advice says he shouldn’t leave the house. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so I will not mention the main topics of Tom’s thinking: it is best to read the book for yourself and see how his thought process takes him through his family’s history and the events that have led up to them being in the situation we find them in. But I think it is worth saying it isn’t as straightforward as a problematic relationship with Luke - there is more to the story than that.

Park is an award-winning author with, according to Goodreads, 10 novels already published. I have to admit this is the first one of his that I have read. It seems to follow in the tradition of lyrical and sad Irish stories (although Park is from Northern Ireland and most of the other authors I am thinking of when I write that are from Eire, I think). Parts of it are beautifully written (the Irish, north and south, do seem to have a way with words!) and insightful. Parts of it, for my taste, are a bit overwritten (many will disagree, but that’s all a matter of personal preference). Unusually for me, I did not highlight any passages as I read: nothing stood out to me as particularly worth preserving in that way.

In the end, this was an interesting and sad story, well told for the most part, but not one I could get excited about reading. But I am not disappointed I read it. Hence the 3 stars rather than anything particularly positive or negative.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A cold, haunting journey, along both the roads of England and the roads of a father’s mind. Very moving.